[nagdu] pets on a train

[Tami Jarvis]

Raven,

I have noticed what you describe in dog-friendly neighborhoods or towns 
and where businesses are dog-friendly, including the peer pressure the 
pet owners impose on each other. I've also been in places where one 
incident will cause a big rush for leash laws or stricter leash laws 
and/ore greater enforcement, along with other laws to deal with all the 
awful dogs around. The result is that there are fewer off leash dogs 
around and more regulation fences around yards, and also more bad 
incidents involving dogs. It has seemed to happen every time. I was 
watching it long before I was a city dog owner, since I wanted to be one 
and paid attention. It was starting to happen in places in Portland 
while I was there, and the pattern seemed to be about the same. For some 
reason, these great pushes to control all those rotten dogs are designed 
to control all dogs instead of addressing the rotten ones -- or the 
owners of the rotten ones. So the responsible dog owners, after the 
years spent training their dogs to be fit to be in public off leash, 
start using their leashes, then using shorter leashes and on and on, 
while figuring out how to protect their leashed dog from all the 
unleashed ones running around that are now universally rotten. So 
incidents keep happening or even increase. In Portland, the economic 
crash changed things, too, so it's not exactly the same. Then we moved, 
so I don't know how it's all working out. There did seem to be as many 
or more incidents after they imposed leash laws or started enforcing 
them, so there was talk of shorter leashes as the solution to the 
problem. If what you're doing doesn't work, do more of it! /lol/

My current working theory of why leash laws don't work as fantastically 
as they are supposed and sometimes have the reverse effect is that by 
getting all the responsible owners to use their leashes and whatever 
else, it clears the field for irresponsible dog owners who don't give a 
fig about the law as long as they don't get caught. They're less likely 
to get caught because animal control is busy running around checking 
leashes and so on.

I'm not sure our overall culture is ready for the type of freedom that 
works some other places, but we could probably ease into it if we could 
manage to give more freedom while expecting more responsibility. And 
including the means to deal with the bad actors directly. I mean the 
human bad actors. Simply taking away the dog isn't going to cure the 
human problem, and the human will just get another dog, sometimes before 
the waiting period is over. Guess what happens then? Sigh.

Oh, well. I'm in favor of opening things up for pets, and I'm also 
interested to see if it works out more or less as I predict. I also 
think it will make things easier for service dog users in some ways, so 
long as the badly behaved pets aren't allowed to stay on the train or in 
the store or whatever. Or I maybe I should say that I think it *could* 
make life easier. It depends on how the majority of service dog users 
respond and whether business owners can learn to be less afraid to deal 
with a problem dog in case it's a service dog.

If it's done stupidly, it could be a horrible, horrible mess. There's 
always that. We'll just have to see.

Tami

On 03/05/2015 10:23 PM, Raven Tolliver via nagdu wrote:
> This is not a first by any stretch. There are many places throughout
> the United States that already allow pets, large and small, on public
> transportation.
> Check it out
> http://www.dogfriendly.com/server/newsletters/features/transportation.shtml
>
> This move by Amtrak is a step in the right direction. People will be
> expected to keep their pets in check by Amtrak and one another, and
> the people who have animals with foul behavior can be removed or
> penalized. Also, people have to pay for their pets, it's not like you
> can just walk on. Let me know if I got that wrong.
> Hopefully, businesses other than public transport will start making
> these allowances. I mean businesses outside of dog-friendly
> communities -- Wal Mart, Target -- businesses like that. There's no
> reason not to hold people to reasonable standards and high
> expectations when it comes to bringing their pets out with them.
> Observing people in dog-friendly communities, most people do a very
> good job of keeping their animals in check. It's not just the
> businesses people are worried about offending, but other pet owners.
> If your dog does something in a business, you could ruin it for
> everyone. If your dog is a nut job while other people's dogs are
> well-behaved, it makes you look bad. And so you don't want to be that
> person -- that person with the noisy dog, that person with the
> foul-smelling dog, with the dog that is out of control, with the dog
> that gets up in everybody else's business, that person who doesn't
> clean up behind their dog. So you are respectful and keep your pet
> respectable to be unoffensive and to keep from being embarrassed.
> These are unspoken rules that naturally arise out of simply giving
> people this freedom.
>